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Monolingual – Remove Languages You Don’t Use From Your Mac

Free up some space on your Mac – delete languages you will never use. Monolingual is a simple Mac app that anyone looking for more hard drive space should check out.

Modern hard drives are big, but sometimes we all need just a little more space on our primary drive. Whether you’ve installed a solid state drive in your Mac or simply filled up your primary one, sometimes a little extra space can help a lot.

Mac OS X includes hundreds of languages, most of which you don’t need. You might well need Spanish, Chinese or even Hebrew on your computer, but do you really need Yiddish? Or Welsh? Or for that matter, invented languages like Esperanto and Klingon, or dead languages like Latin or Sanskrit? All these and more are taking up space on your Mac, right now.

Which languages you need obviously depends on who are – I’m sure at least one person reading this has set Klingon to be their default. More power to you. But next to none of us need every language Apple offers – which isn’t a problem, unless you’re running out of space on your hard drive.

Monolingual removes these languages, and also frees up space by removing PPC-specific files from “Universal” applications.

Removing Languages from Mac

Open this program and you’ll see a complete list of languages included, by default, in OS X. Uncheck any language you want to keep.

Make sure you’re absolutely certain you’re not deleting any languages you need – there’s no real way to get those languages back. The program even warns you:

Again – make certain before going forward. Once you have the removal will begin:

If you’re expecting to save gigs and gigs of space you’ll be disappointed – the languages don’t take up that much. Still, I was able to shed over 100 MB.

You could say it’s not much, but I kept quite a few languages – and any space I can free up on my SSD gives me more room for installing games and apps (not to mention dual-booting).

Removing Architecture-Specific Stuff

Languages aren’t the only trick up this app’s sleeve – it can also delete excess files intended to allow apps to run on multiple architectures.

Confused? Maybe you shouldn’t mess with this, then, but I’ll provide some background. Macs switched from the PowerPC (PPC) processor to Intel back in 2005 – since then a number of apps have been designed to run on both PPC and Intel systems. Such apps are called “Universal”, and were an important part of why Apple’s transition from PPC to Intel was so seamless. In 2013, however, the PPC parts of these Universal apps just take up space on Intel Macs.

So Monolingual can remove the PPC parts of Universal apps. Running this is a bad idea if you plan on using Rosetta to run PPC software, but probably not a problem if you’re using Lion or later – Apple dropped all support for Rosetta with Lion.

Pick which architectures you’re willing to remove from your system:

Monolingual will clean up “Universal” apps, turning them into Intel-only ones. How much space this frees up will obviously depend on how many apps you have installed – and whether they’re Universal – but for me this ended up freeing up more space than the language removal:

Okay, so I probably have more software installed than most – I test software for a living. But again, freeing up 200 MB could be useful for many.

Do you have any other space saving tips for Mac users? Please share them in the comments below – your comments could help us build our best of Mac apps page. Or, if you prefer, just share your thoughts about Monolingual.